Tom Bradley has been in the investment industry for more than 30 years: he has been a equity analyst, a portfolio manager, an executive (he was the chief executive at Phillips Hager & North, one of country’s oldest institutional money managers that was sold to the Royal Bank in 2008) and the founder of another money manager, Steadyhand Investment Funds.

And when he set up that manager he did it his way with a model based on no loads, low fees and external management. Bradley also writes a blog where talks about his investment philosophy and also what he doesn’t like. As a generalization he doesn’t like products that come with high fees, too much structuring, and where it’s not clear how much the investor will gain.

“We’ve built a firm around the way we want our own money managed. And we provide a level of service and reporting that makes sense to us. This means your experience with Steadyhand is likely to be a little, well, different than what you may be used to,” says a posting on its web site.

This week Bradley wrote a blog that has attracted considerable interest given that the material focused on the interests of investors and where they stand in the pecking order. (The short answer is not very high.)

The chances are that the Royal Bank, in particular, won’t take too kindly to what he wrote given that he referenced one of its products. But it’s not a difficult jump to take his comments and apply them to the product manufacturers in general.

Indeed Bradley seems to be invoking retail investors to ask two questions: “what’s in it for me? And what’s in it for the issuer or the agents.” After all it’s their money.